I bought The Scream from Cytomic.

It's a great, high quality emulation of a tube screamer. And it has a TON of options (a crazy amount). I think everything from Cytomic is super high quality in every aspect. Sonically as well as ergonomically and aesthetically.

Having said that, I think The Scream is Andy's least versatile plugin. The Drop (my favourite plugin of his) can do almost anything and everything, including stand alone saturation. The Scream does stompbox distortion and sounds amazing doing it... but it always feels like stompbox distortion. The Drop tends to be much more subtle and controlled, and even when pushed hard doesn't feel so crazy.

The Drop might be my favourite plugin of all time. And I'm so grateful for the fact that The Glue is built into Ableton. And even more grateful that a lot of the filters from The Drop are built natively into Ableton's effects and instruments (although I still prefer to use The Drop for filtering).

And another thing in regards to Cytomic is that Andy and his wife are pretty much the only two people in the company. They do everything themselves and seem to do almost 0 marketing. It's pretty much completely word of mouth advertising for Cytomic, and the fact that they're known at all is completely down to the fact that Andy is a DSP genius and his plugins sound and feel amazing.

I was looking through the U-He DIVA manual the other day and even saw Urs crediting Andy for his help in some aspects. I also heard Steve Duda (the developer of Serum) say that Andy was actually a mentor of his back when they both worked for FXpansion. I think Andy was the main guy behind the synth Strobe. It's also Andy's "medium" quality filters that are native in Serum. His latest "high" quality ones are reserved for The Drop and his upcoming projects.

I've sent him a couple of emails in the past just to thank him for his work in advancing DSP. There aren't too many developers in the world that I have so much respect for. The only others I can think of off the top of my head are Steve Duda from Xfer and Chris Johnson from Airwindows.

Sorry, that was a bit off topic, but I feel like Cytomic (and Airwindows actually) deserve much more recognition for the amount of goodness they add to the world of music production.

 

Thank you captain obvious.

 

The Drop does filtering and sounds amazing doing it... but it doesn't only feel like filtering.

If that's the one thing you got from that whole post then that's hilariously unfortunate, LOL.

 

Ableton's saturator most of the times, decapitator for anything else.

 

Plugin saturation seems to have come a long way until you use the 20 year old Ensoniq PARIS DAW where you could drive it hard and it saturates like hardware. IMHO when looking at VST plugs today none of them allow for the hard edge that you get from running any digital signal through a Moog's ladder filter, a Sherman Filterbank or most guitar pedals. AA's Crimson gets close but still does not get there like any simple analogue device does.

 

Not so obvious if you think on how many companies have a TS plugin and no amp/cab sim and so on.

 

Man, so much good info that I had to give you a love score

Not that you're my type, don't get me wrong

 

I use filters as saturation/distortion too.
Because the best filters use good saturation stages.

Check this filter thread (some good infos) :
https://audiosex.pro/threads/your-favorite-filter-plugins.33168/

 

Ableton's new device PEDAL is awesome and easy to use.

 

Isn't it though? I've been saying this. It actually sounds really good. Not just "good for a stuck plugin".

 

Sounds very good to me, sounds awesome on all my basses.